Pam Adams: New grads face challenges and choices aplenty

Thursday

May 28, 2009 at 12:01 AMMay 28, 2009 at 4:12 PM

To you, dear graduate: Every now and then on a radio station you probably don't listen to, I hear a snippet of a poem by Illinois' late poet laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks. "Whenever I see a president or a vice president," the line goes, "I know someone got there early and swept real good." No one has to remind you that someone got there early to set up the stage and line up the chairs and they would have done it even if the president weren't coming, because graduation is your day.

Pam Adams

To you, dear graduate:

Every now and then on a radio station you probably don't listen to, I hear a snippet of a poem by Illinois' late poet laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks. "Whenever I see a president or a vice president," the line goes, "I know someone got there early and swept real good."

No one has to remind you that someone got there early to set up the stage and line up the chairs and they would have done it even if the president weren't coming, because graduation is your day.

Graduations aren't really about the graduation speaker. The ceremony is really for you, the graduate, and all of the people who got up early and cleared path or pavement so you might walk a little further down a long road.

No one has to tell you, dear graduate, that graduation day might be less sparkling without the custodians cleaning. They are one group among many whose collective work makes it possible for your star-studded day to shine. You already know who your particular early-rising custodians are, from the parents, grandparents, foster parents, teachers, counselors, siblings, uncles, aunts, neighbors, friends, cousins, mentors and bus drivers to the printer who spelled your name right on the graduation program.

And you probably also realize, in spite of their best daily efforts, that the world beyond school isn't offering the same routes to success it did for graduates just a few years ago. Colleges are more expensive and harder to get into, jobs are harder to find - and to keep. For the first time in a very long time, your elders worry that you will have fewer opportunities than they did at your age.

But, if you have been paying attention, you are graduating with wisdom and gifts your parents could not buy and would not have bought if they could.

The sheltered middle-class and upper-middle class among you, even the rich, are learning lessons the poor have always known. You can go to work on time every day and still lose your job. You can pay the mortgage on time every month and still lose your home. You can do everything you're supposed to do the way you're supposed to do it and still not get very far down the road that so many paved and swept before you.

What makes you wise beyond your years is that you already know something about change. You, dear graduate, leave school with a taste of the influence you hold when you reach out to the custodian, the parents and yourselves.

You stunned conventional wisdom when you worked on election campaigns and turned out to vote in historic numbers during the last presidential election. Don't forget the instances where your passion and enthusiasm convinced your parents to vote or change how they intended to vote.

Naysayers doubted your discipline and dismissed efforts to reach you. During the 2008 Republican National Covention, you may recall, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin mocked the community organizing strategies Barack Obama's campaign used to involve you in the political process. You already know the rest of that story.

Now Republicans are tearing their hair out, trying to figure out how to get more of you in their corner and Democrats are ... well, let's just say one of your post-graduation tests is not to let Democrats take you for granted. Obama is President Obama, thanks largely to a community-organizing machine.

If your involvement meant more than voting for the next "American Idol," the next step is to continue working to influence how government, corporations and institutions respond to the people who get there early.

What makes you most impressive, dear graduate, is you seem far less likely to be fooled by the divide-and-conquer strategies so often used to thwart people from acting in concerted and common self-interests. The old divisions - black versus white, immigrant versus non-immigrant, poor versus rich, Catholic versus Protestant - are fading fast in your generation.

What you have is a new broom and an opportunity to sweep real good.

Pam Adams can be reached at padams@pjstar.com.

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